An Elaboration on Texting and Driving

In my last post I spoke about how technology, at times, turns us into mindless zombies.  During the post I briefly mentioned that, sadly, this occurs while people are behind the wheel of a car as well.  Texting and driving is a topic of great interest to me, so I decided to look into other blogs that cover this topic, to find out what kind of rhetoric others use while trying to warn people about texting and driving.

The first post I read was from the blog of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD).  The post was a guest post written by Sandy Spavone, the Executive Director of National Organizations for Youth Safety (NOYS).  The fact that she is an executive director of a national organization already spoke to her credibility (ethos). Spavone began her post by sharing an intimate moment of her life, where she tells us her brother lost a child to drunk driving.  This immediately appealed to my emotions (pathos) and invoked a feeling of sympathy towards her brother, and scorn against the act of drinking and driving.  Once she had me on her side (as if I wasn't already), she got to the topic I had been waiting for.  The new threat of distracted driving due to texting.  Spavone then began throwing numbers and facts at me (logos).  She told me that, "while 97 percent of teens know texting while driving is dangerous, 43 percent of them admit to sending a text while driving, and 75 percent say their friends text and drive."  You know what that means...Yup!  People are much more likely to snitch on their friends than on themselves...but in all seriousness, this statistic clearly shows that more people need to own up to their bad habits and figure out how to remove texting and driving from their lives.  Spavone then increased her credibility further by mentioning that AT&T is taking an initiative to prevent texting and driving and even gave me a link to the page where I could make my pledge to not text and drive.  Here is the link  www.itcanwait.com I certainly hope you decide to take the pledge as well.

So what did I learn from that first post?  I learned it is definitely effective to utilize pathos at first when trying to get your readers attention, and to make sure they're interested in playing for your team.  After that, it is in the writer's advantage to gain credibility by quoting a more reliable source or spitting out some relevant facts to really draw the reader in, and make readers feel like the initial feelings they experienced during pathos were rightly felt.  After reading the first blog post I felt that all three rhetorical strategies were necessary to truly convince an audience, although, in Spavone's post, even during her pathos inducing story about her brother, her tone made it feel like a boring public service announcement or commercial...the second blog post left no sort of feeling.

The second blog was started by this family run and family owned company that is against texting and driving called, 'Don't Text and Drive'.  The post is an email that the company recieved from a reader.  It is called 'I wish I never saw it!', the author is anonymous.

When I began reading, I expected another short anecdote (I don't know why, the title doesn't appear to relay that) and maybe some facts spit at me afterwards...I received nothing of the sort.  This parent from London proceeded to tell me a gruesome story of how they work at a facility that handles wrecked vehicles before they are sent to the junkyard or sold to another facility for parts.  They said that plenty of vehicles come in with blood stains all over the place and that they were used to that, but one day they saw a van with a child's seat in it that, "was half its original width in the middle and was obviously twisted out of shape from the impact."  The parent then admits that they, "lost it right then and there i just sat down and cried."  Later the parent finds out from their boss that the crash occured because the mother driving was texting and ran a red light...

Holy smokes batman...the second blog post utilized literally no logos and little pathos, but evicted a much stronger reaction out of me than the first.  What it really goes to show is if you have a compelling story, tell it.  If you have some compelling facts, share them.  But in the end I believe there is an appropriate ratio of ethos, logos, and pathos for each and every situation.  It just depends on the scenario, and the audience you're trying to reach.

Blog 1: http://www.madd.org/blog/2012/sept/texting-while-driving.html

Blog 2: http://www.textinganddrivingsafety.com/dont-text-and-drive-blog/